Reasoning:
The EU has the ability to make the green economic transition beneficial for all. This entails ensuring that firms source their materials ethically, and ensure that both their own employees and those of the mining firms they outsource the operations to make sure that compensation is equitable and appropriate and that working conditions are ensured. Furthermore, it has been debated in various economic literature, that extending value-added processes to developing countries will allow them to economically develop and gain in wealth. Crucially, this will also need to entail environmental considerations, as the type and consistency of energy production should be included in such an investment campaign. Nonetheless, this would allow for natural resource producing countries to gain larger shares of the value-added produced, and therefore, bring both the environmental benefits to EU countries importing these natural resources, and at the same contribute to improving working and living conditions in natural resource producing countries. Furthermore, natural resource projects have had in many cases socially harmful impacts. These can be reduced by including the communities affected by them in the decision-making processes.
Sources:
RAID, & CAJJ. (2021). THE ROAD TO RUIN?: Electric vehicles and workers’ rights abuses at DR Congo’s industrial cobalt mines (pp. 1–87). Rights and Accountability Development.
https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/ciem10d2_en.pdf
The Status of the Local Community in Mining Sustainable Development beyond the Triple Bottom Line - Sisi Que, Liang Wang , Kwame Awuah-Offei , Yao Chen and Wei Yang.